Christmastime 1942

by Linda Mahkovec

  Tommy cracked his knuckles wondering if he would have to knock at her door to collect the things. What if her mother answered? Or her father?

  “Have you decided on your science project?” Amy asked, as she pushed her glasses up her nose.

  “Not yet.” Tommy swallowed, and searched around for the next words. “Have you?”

  “I’m thinking of doing something on botany. Or the planets.” After each topic, she waited for Tommy’s reaction. “Or maybe cloud formation. Do you think that’s interesting?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Tommy gave a quick look at the overcast sky but didn’t see a single cloud to comment on.

  “The teacher said we could form teams.” Amy twisted from side to side, offering up suggestions one at a time as she waited for Tommy’s response. “If we wanted to. Sometimes it’s easier that way. You know – two minds are better than one.”

  Gabriel opened his eyes wide and smiled. Here was Tommy’s big chance. Easy as pie.

  “Yeah. Well, see ya,” said Tommy, and he ran up the stairs.

  “Oh. Okay. Bye,” said Amy. She gave a light shrug, and began to walk away.

  “Bye, Amy!” cried Gabriel, following Tommy up the stairs.

  Inside the vestibule, Gabriel poked Tommy in the side. “What happened to ‘Be bold?’”

  “I was. I talked to her, didn’t I?”

  “Not like Gino said to.”

  Mrs. Kuntzman opened her door. “Come, come boys. Inside. I make youse some Ovaltine and oatmeal raisin cookies. How about that?”

  “Sounds great!” Tommy said, whipping off his coat, and suddenly interested in the snack.

  Gabriel gave him another poke. “You should have said you liked clouds and would be her science partner.”

  Tommy frowned. “I’ll – I’ll talk to her more next time,” he said in a low voice. “You have to take it a step at a time.”

  Gabriel shook his head at Tommy, who had already run into the kitchen.

  *

  Lillian wiped the steam from the mirror, and breathed a sigh of relaxation after her bath. She searched inside the basket on the shelf, then inside the medicine cabinet. She wanted to put a few pin curls in place, but she couldn’t find a single hair pin. She opened the bathroom cupboard, and lifted the folded towels. She hadn’t noticed that she was running low. How could she have possibly lost them all?

  Her attention was diverted by the sounds of Tommy and Gabriel arguing. She tied her robe, and went out to the kitchen.

  “It’s my lunchbox!” cried Gabriel.

  “But we need it for the drive! It’s on the list of items to collect.”

  “But it’s still good. You don’t have to give away good things. That’s why it’s called a scrap drive!”

  “Gabriel,” said Tommy, dramatically placing his hand on Gabriel’s Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox. “This could be the bullet that kills Hitler.”

  “I don’t want my lunchbox to be a bullet. Use your own!”

  “I am, but we need – ”

  “Boys, what’s going on?”

  Gabriel snatched the lunchbox and held it tightly under his arm.

  “We need things for our salvage drive, but Gabriel won’t give me his lunchbox. They have plenty of those new ones made out of cardboard. That’s what we’re supposed to be using.”

  Lillian looked in the bag that Tommy had on the kitchen table. She saw two flattened tin cans, and at the bottom of the bag – “My hairpins! Thomas Drooms! You can’t just take things from people without asking! I just spent ten minutes looking for these,” she said, gathering up her hair pins. “And that’s Gabriel’s lunchbox. You can give yours if you want to, but leave Gabriel’s alone.” She took a good look at Tommy. “What’s gotten into you lately, anyway?”

  Tommy plopped down on the chair. “Nothing! I just want to do a good job on the scrap drive. And so far, it’s just one big snafu after another. People say they already gave their scraps to someone else, or brought them to the store when they dropped off their grease. Billy keeps quitting on us. So far we’re in fourth place, and – ”

  “But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it,” Lillian said, wondering at Tommy’s increasing frustration with everything.

  “Hey,” said Gabriel, “what does snafu mean? Gino forgot to tell me.”

  “Each letter stands for a word,” Tommy explained. “Situation normal, all f– ”

  “Tommy!” snapped Lillian, before he could finish the offending word.

  “All fouled up,” said Tommy with a mischievous glint in his eye.

  “Oh. So we’ll get rid of all the snafus, and try out our plan,” said Gabriel.

  “We only have two more weeks left,” said Tommy.

  Lillian tweaked his nose and then put her arm around him. “Anything you collect will help the war effort. That’s the main thing. Besides, a lot can happen in two weeks.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Tommy. He lifted his face to her. “Sorry about the hairpins, Mom.”

  Lillian coiled a strand of hair and secured it with a hair pin. “I saw Mrs. Wilson today, and she said she’s going to clean out her closets and tell everyone else in her building to do the same thing. Maybe that will help.”

  “Mommy, can we have hot water bottles tonight?” asked Gabriel.

  Lillian put in a few more pin curls. “You boys get ready for bed, and I’ll start boiling some water.”

  “They’re collecting hot water bottles, too,” said Tommy.

  Lillian’s hand froze in the last pin curl.

  “There’s a rubber shortage,” he said. “Bad.”

  Lillian dropped her hands and considered giving up the water bottles. But with the fuel rationed, the apartment was often cold. I have to keep my children warm, she thought. But what about the men in faraway places, suffering, dying, to protect us? Everything should go to help them.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” said Tommy. “We don’t start the rubber drive until after Christmas.”

  Lillian put a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “Tomorrow we’ll look down in the basement. Make sure there’s nothing we’re forgetting. Gabriel’s tricycle is down there. We won’t be needing that anymore. Maybe there are some other things. Our old gardening tools are down there.”

  “No. We need those for our Victory Garden this summer,” said Gabriel. “On the roof. Mrs. Wilson said there’s going to be a garden on every roof on our block.”

  Lillian let out a deep sigh. “We’ll sort it all out tomorrow. For now, I want you to take your baths.”

  “Sure, Mom.” Tommy eyed Gabriel’s lunchbox and began to hum, ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas.’”

  Gabriel clutched his lunchbox.

  “Go on, Tommy,” said Lillian. “You first.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Tommy, heading for the bathroom.

  She took the lunchbox and set it on the counter.

  “Mommy,” said Gabriel, “we’re lucky we live on the third floor.”

  “Why is that?” asked Lillian, filling a pan of water and then setting it on the stove.

  “Because if we’re gassed, we’ll be above it.”

  Lillian turned to him. What on earth was he talking about?

  “Today we learned what to do in a gas attack. They said to go to the highest spot in your house because gas is heavy and will sink.”

  Lillian stared at Gabriel. Was her little boy really thinking about what to do in a gas attack?

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” said Gabriel, seeing her frightened expression. “If it comes up this high, we’ll go up on the roof.”

  She gave him a quick hug, and tried to sound cheerful. “I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that. Why don’t you finish reading The Long Winter, and then you can tell me how it ends.”

  Gabriel was immediately back in the 1880s, the Dakota Territory blizzards blowing hard. He pinched his eyebrows together in concern. “The trains have stopped running, and Pa’s gettin’ worried. They have to twist the hay into ropes for fuel, so t
hey can keep the ole stove going,” he said, his hands torqueing the imaginary hay.

  Lillian shivered dramatically and lit the burner. “Thank goodness we have hot water bottles.”

  Gabriel laughed, and ran off to get ready for bed.

  Once the boys were tucked in with their books and hot water bottles, Lillian sat on the couch and stared into the empty fireplace. She tucked her legs under her and wondered where they were all heading in this war, and hoped that Tommy and Gabriel would never have to experience the battlefield. She kept thinking of that poor mother who had lost all five of her sons last month. All on the same ship in the Pacific. How does one go on after that?

  She tried to keep focused on the day to day, to make sure the boys felt as safe and secure as possible. But every now and then, she was flooded by a sickening sense of dread. And fear. Ever since that Life magazine article came out last year. As she remembered the photographs that had been smuggled out of Poland, her face crumpled in pity and revulsion at what was being done to those poor people. The emaciated bodies, the hopeless faces. That poor, pathetic child, more dead than alive – pencil-thin arms and legs, a horribly protruded stomach, dark hollow eyes that stared back at her, asking Why? Why? – an image that would haunt her forever. She closed her eyes as she remembered the horrors that had been written about. No one could have imagined it could be that bad. And now more stories were trickling in from the Pacific about an incident that occurred in the spring from some place called Bataan.

  Before the magazine article, Lillian had believed that such stories were propaganda and exaggerations. She could not accept that such horrors were true, that human beings were capable of such atrocities. She knew that war was terrible, and that some people behaved like monsters – but that so many people willingly participated in such acts, or turned their heads – she still wanted to believe that it couldn’t be true. But that was no longer possible. She had to admit to an ugliness in human nature that she never before believed in.

  She tried to quell the mounting despair, tried to put aside the disturbing images, and focus on today. What could she do now? Action. That was always her remedy against despair.

  Her sketch pad sat on the corner of the coffee table, reminding her of her work assignment. She would have to submit something for the contest – might as well get started.

  The images that came to her were not the ones that Rockwell was asking for. She wanted to counter the horrors of war. She wanted to draw mothers packing up boxes to send to their sons, volunteers on the home front helping where they could, children pulling a wagon for their scrap drive.

  She didn’t want to draw caricatures of the enemy. Or fields of barbed wire, and sinking ships. And yet she had to submit something. And prove that she could draw something that wasn’t sweet. She groaned at Rockwell’s assessment of her work.

  She lifted her pencil and sketched a soldier holding a tattered flag in battle. Then scratched it out. A proud father watching his son leave home. She crumbled the paper. Then she tried a train station, with a couple saying goodbye to each other. A good composition, but it was still too sweet. She erased the male figure, and let her pencil make a few lines, and a few more, drawing the man as a skeleton. He still wore his officer’s cap, and the couple clung to each other in a passionate farewell. She picked up a blue oil pastel crayon and shaded the woman’s coat, the officer’s cap.

  Leaning back, she held the drawing out at arm’s length, expecting to be pleased with the result. But with a gasp, she covered her mouth, realizing that the couple looked like her and Charles. Appalled, she ripped out the drawing and tore it up. What was she thinking?! A horrible sense of foreboding filled her. She got up and threw the bits of paper into the fireplace and struck a match. The paper caught fire and then shriveled to black.

  She held her face in her hands. How had the world become such a horrible place? The war’s darkness was enveloping the world, her world, her mind. She stood looking into the empty fireplace, the ashy grate expanding into an ever-widening black void.

  Then came the light, clear voice of Gabriel – halting the downward pull of despair. “Goodnight, Mommy!” he called out, as he often did before going to sleep.

  Those beautiful, pure words of childhood pierced her and filled her with gratitude that here was a tiny space still untouched by the horrors of war. Gratitude that her children were safe, well-fed, and ignorant of the awfulness of human nature.

  She went to their room and gazed down at her boys. Tommy was already asleep, with the lamplight shining on his sweet face. She picked up his comic book that had fallen to the floor. Gabriel was lying on his side smiling up at her, his hands tucked under his cheek, just like a little storybook boy.

  “I didn’t get to the end of my book, Mom, but Pa says the spring thaw is finally coming, and the train will get through. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “Thank goodness!” she said, putting her hand on his cheek.

  She kissed them both goodnight, and turned off the light.

  Then she finally went to bed, feeling that she had been rescued.

  Chapter 7

  *

  Mason looked up from his book as his wife placed a steaming cup of coffee next to him. Just as she turned away, he playfully reached for her hand and gave it a quick kiss. He took a sip of coffee, and sank deeper into his old wing-backed chair. A small lift of contentment formed on his lips as he glanced around the living room. It was late afternoon, and though snowflakes drifted past the window, inside it was snug, comfortable. Light from the lamp behind his chair filled the room with a sense of warmth and hominess. A faint scent of pine came from the small Christmas tree in the corner. The radiator softly hissed. The workweek was over, and he was surrounded by his family – his favorite way to spend the day.

  Susan had put the baby down for a nap, made the coffee, and now, with a sigh of pleasure at having a little time to relax, she plumped down in the chair across from him, and enjoyed a few sips of coffee. As she gathered up her knitting, their five-year-old daughter climbed onto her lap with her doll. Susan managed to knit with the little girl snuggled up next to her.

  The eleven-year-old twins sat in the window seat facing each other, engrossed in their books. A deep-green afghan was draped over their bent knees, forming a small mountain between them.

  Mason was indulging in his Christmas tradition of reading Charles Dickens. Every December he decided on a book by his favorite author. Last year he had chosen Bleak House – this year he was re-reading Nicholas Nickleby. He was just settling into his book when his domestic bliss was abruptly interrupted by the whirlwind of his mother and his youngest sister, Alice, as they burst into the room.

  “We’re off!” cried his mother, checking the contents of her purse before snapping it shut. “We must hurry before the stores close. We’re on a hunt for red satin for the girls’ costumes.”

  Mason set his book down, with a touch of annoyance. “I thought you were finished with all that Fractured Follies business,” he said.

  “That was for the drama last weekend,” explained Alice. “Now we’re working on costumes for the chorus line,” and with that she gave a high kick.

  “Bravo, Alice,” applauded his mother, “but do be careful of the lampshade.”

  Alice straightened the shade, and sat on the edge of the couch. “I wish you’d join us, Robert. We have far too many women dressed as men. Sort of Shakespeare in reverse. Won’t you reconsider?”

  “You’ll not find me in any theatricals. There’s enough of that going on in this house as it is.” He gave a look over his glasses at Edith, who was just coming down the stairs, dressed to go out.

  “We’ve been such a success,” continued Alice, “that they’ve lined us up at three more veterans’ hospitals. The men are wild about us! The patients, I mean. And these chorus line costumes will be stunning!” Alice pulled on her coat and followed her mother out the door, calling back, “But don’t worry, Robert, we won’t spend too much.�
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  “It’s not the cost I’m worried about!” he shouted after them. “It’s that I never know where anyone is anymore!” He stared at the closed door in exasperation.

  Edith perched on the hall tree bench, pulling on her boots, mildly amused by her brother’s ongoing frustration with the family.

  Mason rose from his chair and paced the living room, looking from Susan to Edith. “Claudia wanting to join the WAVES, Alice and Helen in chorus lines and doing God knows what.”

  Susan was accustomed to her husband’s periodic bursts of vexation with his sisters. She shifted her little girl to the other side of her lap, and then calmly resumed her knitting. “Times are changing, Robert. The girls are merely keeping up with them. They all want to do their duty.”

  “And have as much fun as possible in the process,” he added.

  “Well, what’s wrong with that, for heaven’s sake? We need to counteract the dreadful news somehow. I’m glad for their cheerfulness. And it helps to dispel some of your gloom.” Susan exchanged a smiling glance with Edith.

  “And you, Edith!” Mason called into the hallway. “They’re taking their cue from you – out at all hours, running around with an actor!”

  Edith stood in front of the hall mirror and positioned her hat. “Berate me all you want, if it makes you feel better, but don’t you dare disparage a man that you haven’t even had the simple courtesy to meet.”

  Mason plopped down in his chair, threw his hands up, and let them drop heavily on his lap. “I just don’t understand it, Edith. Why now? Why him? When you had other chances with stable, dependable young men – ”

  “Like Jack?” Edith shot a cutting glance at her brother. But the shadow that passed over his face made her regret her response.

  She crossed into the living room and placed a hand on the back of his chair. “You fret too much, Robert. A useless way to spend your time. We’re all old enough to be making our own decisions. For God’s sake, I’m almost thirty-four. This could be my last chance for happiness. You should rejoice. No one wants a maiden sister hanging about forever.”